Lemon 🍋
Does things to the internet. The internet does things to him as well.
Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States
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With a lifelong passion for the weirdness of the internet and a day job as a development lead for whoever hired him, Lemon spends his professional time making websites for money and his free time making websites for no money.
He's created a number of stupid things for the internet, like all the games on kinda.fun, the wikiHow guessing game damn.dog, the Google Autocomplete game idiots.win, and a bunch of other things of questionable use. He also hosts a podcast that looks at some of the internet's weirder subcultures. It is not safe for your work, unless you work somewhere really cool.
Area of Expertise
Topics
Designers vs Developers: Who is in control here?
The designers are creative, the developers are talented, so why are you miserable all the time? The project is a mess, there’s about a hundred tickets about the whitespace between items, and everybody is mad at each other because we’re behind schedule. How did it get like this, and how can we fix it?
In this high-energy talk focused on developers, Lemon shares a framework for effective and respectful communication between development and design teams, making sure that everyone feels appreciated and confident to provide suggestions in good faith. We’ll talk about the shifting power structure between these roles thru the lifecycle of a website, from the pitch all the way up to launch, and how every member of the team can stay engaged and feel heard at every step.
This is a talk for developers who struggle to collaborate with the designers at their workplace, it’s borne from many years of designer/developer collaboration in an agency environment. It’s fun and high-energy and focused on defining helpful parameters to build a respectful and collaborative work environment.
Can AI Pass Your Accessibility Audit? Yes. Also No.
You've already had this argument. Someone dropped an AI accessibility scanner's report into Slack and said "See? we're basically done." and somebody else in the room aged five years in real time. Nobody misread the findings. They misread how final they were.
Good news first: some of this is easier than you think. Claude and Codex know the WCAG spec by heart. They know to scour for missing labels, busted focus states, and contrast that never should have shipped. That doesn't replace you. It just narrows down where you're actually needed. That's the part that never actually finishes: Accessibility isn't a state you reach and walk away from, it's a habit of making things a little better than you found them, forever.
In this high-energy session, Lemon walks through the actual system he built to put that split into practice, one that hands you a clean verdict on every accessibility check: pass, fail, or needs a human to look. That's the actual bar, not a marketing one. You'll leave with an actual workflow, not just the philosophy behind it.
The CSS You Don’t Know About
CSS has never been more powerful, intuitive, or exciting! With groundbreaking features such as scroll-linked animations, advanced text wrapping and nesting, intelligent selectors like :has() and :not(), and the adaptive magic of container queries — the way we build the web is evolving like never before.
In this fast-paced and high-energy talk, Lemon will introduce you to the latest and greatest features of modern CSS, and give you tips for using them to transform your projects—whether you’re giving an old site a fresh coat of paint or leveling up your current workflow. Get ready to expand your CSS toolkit and create beautiful, performant designs with confidence. This is the CSS you didn’t know you’ve been waiting for.
Accessibility: A Little Bit Better Is Better Than Nothing
You've heard accessibility is important in helping the world see your sites, but where are you supposed to start? It’s a big and complicated topic, enough to make some people throw up their hands and just give up on the concept entirely. But we can turn it from a terrifying mountain to a series of small hills when we think about marginal, gradual improvements.
In this workshop, Lemon will explain some fundamentals of HTML semantics and how they end up affecting the end users of your website. We’ll then do some live exercises improving the markup of some example code without changing anything about the design, and then describe some different types of impairments that your users could have, and practice taking some steps to get your content to those users.
Bring your laptop and come ready to rewrite some code, because we’re gonna start making gradual steps towards a more accessible internet, and we’re gonna start today.
This workshop is specifically designed to help working web developers make first steps towards writing more accessible code in their workplaces.
How To Make Your Website A Progressive Web App (And Why You Might Want To)
For years, web developers and app developers have been siloed, looking at each other with jealousy. How come these people get to do push notifications? How come these people have such a simple build process? And why can’t we all just work with the same codebase?
A PWA (Progressive Web App) marries all these needs together, starting with a run-of-the-mill website and adding features as they’re appropriate. The most interesting part: You can start with a website you’ve been working on right now.
In this talk, Lemon will take you through the process of starting with a simple HTML website add add features like caching, notifications, desktop installation and offline mode to create an app that’s as interesting and dynamic as you’d want it to be.
Load Fast, Don’t Suck: Some Honest Advice For Core Web Vitals
The modern web is an optimization battlefield. Even with the best intentions, websites are relentlessly getting bigger, more complex, and slower, leaving us with frustratingly limited information to diagnose speed problems. That's why the Core Web Vitals finally gave us the numbers we needed to measure actual user frustration. Yes, these metrics are important for ranking, but more critically, we can gain insight into user experience and frustration, and that makes a website worth using. This isn't a theory lecture; this is some honest advice born from experience.
We’re going to stop fiddling with low-impact fixes and jump straight into the metrics that directly impact your users’ ability to engage with your site. This talk delivers a fast-paced, practical breakdown of:
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Stopping spontaneous layout changes with advanced CSS techniques that ensure stability.
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Fixing janky, broken page loads by exploring resource prioritization required for fast initial rendering.
- Total Blocking Time (TBT): Addressing main thread blockage by finding and fixing the JavaScript that is locking up your user’s browser.
This high-energy session is aimed at any developer who is ready to move past guesswork and ship better products. You will walk away with a definitive roadmap for debugging and fixing your Core Web Vitals scores, ultimately building sites that are faster and hopefully suck less.
Build Stuff 2026 Lithuania Sessionize Event Upcoming
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PubConf: Tech In Hell
Blind Deck: I'll See You In Hell
NDC Oslo 2022 Sessionize Event
PubConf: Armageddon
Blind Deck: Burning Production
KCDC 2022 Sessionize Event
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DDD 2020 Sessionize Event
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PubConf KC
3rd place winner
KCDC 2019 Sessionize Event
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PubConf Minnesota
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NDC Minnesota 2019 Sessionize Event
dev up Conference 2018 Sessionize Event
PubConf Sydney
3rd place winner
NDC Sydney 2018 Sessionize Event
PubConf KC
1st place winner
KCDC 2018 Sessionize Event
PubConf Minnesota
1st place winner
NDC Minnesota 2018 Sessionize Event
Minnebar 2018
*Literally ANYTHING But Wordpress
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